Bing suffers outage after rolling out new features

Just a day after Bing rolled out an array of changes and updates including its new Bing Maps, Microsoft had to apologize after its search engine went offline on Thursday evening.

Bing users were unable to access the site between 6:30pm to 7:00pm PST. At first, the site was simply unresponsive or returned partial search results. The page then turned into an error page explaining that the site was unavailable.

Microsoft addressed the outage last night in a blog post, writing, the cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.

As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior, Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Bing's online services division, said in the blog post.

Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com.

We strive to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing, Nadella said. We are running a post mortem to find out how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again.

Bing is currently the third most popular search engine in the U.S., garnering 9.9 percent of queries in October, according to comScore.

Google stood comfortably in the top position with 65.4 percent and Yahoo was second with 18 percent.